Terry Teachout's Blog, page 205

TT: Almanac

"Some spoke of the nobility of the law. Stern did not believe in that. Too much of the grubby boneshop, the odor of the abattoir, emanateed from every courtroom he had entered. It was often a nasty business. But the law, at least, sought to govern misfortune, the slights and injuries of our social existence that were otherwise wholly random. The law's object was to let the seas engulf only those who had been seleted for drowning on an orderly basis. In human affairs, reason would never fully triumph; but there was no better cause to champion."

Scott Turow, The Burden of Proof

TT: Almanac

"When you have loved as she has loved, you grow old beautifully."

W. Somerset Maugham, The Circle

TT: Sauce for the gander

In today's Wall Street Journal drama column I write about a Chicago show, Writers' Theatre's revival of Tom Stoppard's The Real Thing , and an off-Broadway show, the Atlantic Theatre Company's premiere of Adam Rapp's Dreams of Flying Dreams of Falling . The first is better--by far. Here's an excerpt.

* * *

Tom Stoppard is known for writing plays of ideas that are sufficiently witty to sugar the pill of their eggheady subject matter. "The Real Thing," though it contains far more than its fair share of glittering wit and bristling complications, is a play of a different sort, a study of a modern marriage built atop the wreckage of unfaithfulness that threatens to be destroyed by the same destructive force that brought it into being. Small wonder that three decades after it opened in London, "The Real Thing" remains Mr. Stoppard's best-loved play. Not surprisingly, it gets done fairly often, but I doubt that "The Real Thing" will soon receive a better production than the one now playing at Chicago's Writers' Theatre. Staged with heartfelt clarity by Michael Halberstam, the company's artistic director, this is the kind of show that reminds you of why you go to the theater in the first place, and makes you wonder why anybody settles for anything less....

Mr. Halberstam, whom New York audiences know as the director of "A Minister's Wife," has given us an unusually intimate staging of "The Real Thing" that profits no end from being performed in Writers' Theatre's 108-seat house. Punch lines that would need to be nailed to the back wall of a Broadway-sized theater can instead be tossed off with deceptive casualness, allowing the audience to concentrate not on Mr. Stoppard's jokes but on the increasingly hurtful truths that his characters tell one another....

The ever-trendy Adam Rapp is at it again with "Dreams of Flying Dreams of Falling," a play that is as trite as it is smug. The setting is "an opulent Connecticut home" and the subject is the soulnessness of the upper middle classes, whose members, Mr. Rapp assures us, are empty shells of brittle good manners whose only hope of redemption is to have wild sex and/or to be led by their black servants down the path to politico-spiritual enlightenment....

* * *

Read the whole thing here .

TT: So you want to see a show?

Here's my list of recommended Broadway, off-Broadway, and out-of-town shows, updated weekly. In all cases, I gave these shows favorable reviews (if sometimes qualifiedly so) in The Wall Street Journal when they opened. For more information, click on the title.

BROADWAY:

• Anything Goes (musical, G/PG-13, mildly adult subject matter that will be unintelligible to children, closes Apr. 29, most performances sold out last week, reviewed here)

• Follies (musical, PG-13, adult subject matter, closes Jan. 22, most performances sold out last week, reviewed here)

• How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying (musical, G/PG-13, perfectly fine for children whose parents aren't actively prudish, reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:

• Avenue Q (musical, R, adult subject matter and one show-stopping scene of puppet-on-puppet sex, reviewed here)

• The Fantasticks (musical, G, suitable for children capable of enjoying a love story, reviewed here)

• Million Dollar Quartet (jukebox musical, G, off-Broadway remounting of Broadway production, original run reviewed here)

IN ASHLAND, OREGON:

• August: Osage County (drama, PG-13/R, closes Nov. 5, reviewed here)

• Julius Caesar (Shakespeare, PG-13, closes Nov. 6, reviewed here)

• Measure for Measure (Shakespeare, PG-13, closes Nov. 6, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON OFF BROADWAY:

• Lemon Sky (drama, PG-13/R, adult subject matter, closes Oct. 22, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK IN NEW HAVEN, CONNECTICUT:

• Molly Sweeney (drama, G, too serious for children, New Haven remounting of off-Broadway production, closes Oct. 16, original run reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK IN WASHINGTON, D.C.:

• The Habit of Art (serious comedy, R, adult subject matter, closes Oct. 16, reviewed here)

CLOSING TODAY IN HARTFORD, CONNECTICUT:

• The Crucible (drama, PG-13, partial nudity, reviewed here)

CLOSING SATURDAY IN ASHLAND, OREGON:

• The Pirates of Penzance (operetta, G, suitable for children, reviewed here)

TT: Almanac

"It is unsafe to take your reader for more of a fool than he is."

W. Somerset Maugham, Ten Novels and Their Authors

TT: Snapshot

A concert by Stan Getz, Gary Burton, Steve Swallow, and Roy Haynes, taped by the BBC in 1966 at the London School of Economics:



(This is the latest in a weekly series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Wednesday.)

TT: Almanac

"No one should come to New York to live unless he is willing to be lucky."

E.B. White, Here is New York

TT: Almanac

"Television will enormously enlarge the eye's range, and, like radio, will advertise the Elsewhere. Together with the tabs, the mags, and the movies, it will insist that we forget the primary and the near in favor of the secondary and the remote."

E.B. White, One Man's Meat

TT: Happy ending

Lauren Teachout, my niece, got married to Ryan Dukes, her longtime boyfriend, in Smalltown, U.S.A., on Saturday afternoon. Regular readers of this blog know that my mother has been seriously ill all summer long, and until last Thursday we assumed that she would be unable to attend the ceremony. Nevertheless, she wanted very much to go, and on Thursday her doctors gave her the green light. Rarely have I seen anyone so happy as my mother was when she heard the news--or when we wheeled her into the church to watch her beloved granddaughter tie the knot. You won't be surprised to hear that many tears were shed.

On Sunday Mrs. T and I got in our rented car and drove up to Kansas City, where we chowed down on Winstead's steakburgers before checking into our hotel. (This is her first visit to my second home town, and I wanted to start it off on a high note.) Alas, the sun set too soon for me to show her around, but we did drive past the brand-new Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts , designed by Moshe Safdie, which cuts quite a figure--so to speak--when viewed from a distance.

I'll be giving a lecture tonight at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. The festivities start at seven p.m. and admission is free. I'll be signing copies of Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong (or any other book by me that you care to bring along) after the lecture and a question-and-answer session. Should you be interested in hearing me live and in person, go here for more information.

I'll also be appearing on Up to Date, Steve Kraske's hour-long radio show, which airs at eleven a.m. CT today on KCUR-FM, Kansas City's NPR-affiliated station. Tune in to 89.3 FM if you live in the area, or go here if you find it more convenient to listen to the show via streaming audio or download a podcast version.

* * *

I returned to Kansas City in 2009 for the first time after a decade-long absence, and wrote about it here .

In other news, I updated the right-hand column over the weekend, posting new entries in the Top Five, "Out of the Past," "TT in Commentary," and "TT Elsewhere" modules. If you don't have anything better to do this week, take a look.

TT: Just because

Johnny Cash and the Tennessee Two perform "Get Rhythm" on Tex Ritter's Ranch Party: